Description

Digitalsmiths, company which creates metadata around video images, has acquired Gotuit, a company which produces human metadata authoring, the companies announced today. Earlier this month, at the New Tee Vee Live conference, we spoke with Digitalsmith's CEO Ben Weinberger for an update on his company and on the growing value of metadata around video. More on the deal by Ryan Lawler at New Tee Vee.

Transcript

Digitalsmiths' Ben Weinberger on the Growing Value of Metadata So I think some of the big developments on the marketplace today are the obvious ones around connected devices or maybe not so obvious. But connected devices, they got big development where now not just in a close network but sort of open IP access, and that’s important not just for me, access to content but where it enables technologically. So now you can make web service calls, you can have a better search experience. You can do things that just simply or not possible on a set-top box or not possible on a fix piece of hardware, so things are going to be big as really important in the industry. As the connected devices become more prolific, Digitalsmiths’ are all – I think it's really pretty simple. There’s no way consumers are going to be like get to all that content without a better search and discovery experience. And at search and discovery experience is going to be, you know pretty horrible if it's not relevant and personalized. So you know, you need things for you and I need things for me, and I don’t care what you want, I don’t care what I want or vice versa. I think advertising is one of the long term end games for Digitalsmiths where we can supply our data to help target and make the ad experience relevant as well. So not just the content relevant and personalized to you, but the ads and also become relevant to the content and thus to you. Yeah I think it's both. So we click behavioral information. So it's making me as relevant to both the audience and the content. And today, it's easy to do when a content using our data where the only people have that kind of data, and I think down the road, you will be able to combine lots of inputs including behavioral information to make it universally relevant. The ones that we’re most concerned about or ones we don’t know about, the Garage Startup. We tend to see people coming in and out of conversations. For example, if its a sports deal, you tend to get groups like go to it involved and they’re very good at that. If it's other types of deals that might have a very special niche, you might hear about a player here and there but, there doesn’t seem to be a consistent metadata focus like with Digitalsmiths. You know we have a singular meta data focus and I don’t think it does really has that.